From Han Han’s blog

Recently I read some Shanghai related news, it is very interesting to connect them together. First, Shanghai’s concrete mixer vehicles drive the city construction in the rate of crushing one person dead each day on average. If this continues, China’s pavilions will be dyed in red with insignificant people’s blood.

Secondly, Politics and Law Committee secretary in Shanghai announced that he is determined to not allow the gangsters to be established in Shanghai. To this I feel rather at ease, because everything is so expensive in Shanghai, not that many gang leaders can afford to support any of their little brothers, Shanghai has already put an end to the creation of gangs from their roots.

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From Beijing News:
by Shi Jia (石嘉)

The reason China’s reaction was so fast when after Haiti earthquake struck, is perhaps due to our painful memories of the (Wenchuan) earthquake. Disasters do not happen frequently, but difficulties happen very often. Maybe if we only land a helping hand, they would not be buried; if only we help out a little, they would not be submerged.

Haiti earthquake shook far more than just the people of Haiti. On January 14 New York Times’ report on Haiti started like this:

The Associated Press reports, Help began arriving early Thursday when an Air China plane carrying a Chinese search-and-rescue team, medics and aid landed at Port-au-Prince airport, and more than 50 people in orange jumpsuits got out accompanied by trained dogs.

This I am afraid is one of few times when international media reporting on a foreign disaster, which puts actions from China into the text, and more than once.

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For those of you that are in China right now and need VPN software to access Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, (soon Google?) etc… or for some reason you just want to surf the internet anonymously or want to bypass SOME KIND OF FIREWALL, we are giving away 10 six month subscriptions of Freedur 2.1 VPN software for free! It will allow you to do all of that. And they are valued at 39.95 USD each!

To Participate in the drawing, all you have to do is retweet this link with #ChinaHush in the message. (Remember #ChinaHush, with #) 10 lucky winners will be randomly selected in one week, at midnight of January 21, 2009.

Freedur 2.1 was just released, it is now a full VPN application instead of a proxy. Check out the review we posted for the last version Freedur 2.0.

The drawing is over, And the winners are…

@neo2049 confirmed
@ditchwitch27 confirmed
@changshanotes confirmed
@weelingsoh confirmed
@stinson confirmed
@islash confirmed
@numberss confirmed
@beijingdaze confirmed
@WildPixels confirmed
@nuochan confirmed

Congratulations! The next step is to email me chinahush[at]gmail.com with the email address which you want the account to be setup to.  If you DON’T email me in a week, another winner will be selected! Thank you all for participate in the drawing!

And remember, even if you don’t win, the coupon code CHINAHUSH still works for Freedur 2.1, enter the coupon code CHINAHUSH and you will receive an additional 10% discount when purchasing it!

I picked these two articles because they showed two completely different views on the Google China situation in China. First one is a blog post written by KESO (洪波) a well-known IT blogger in China.  (I have translated one of is blog posts back when Kai-fu Lee resigned from Google China.) The latter one is an article from one of the Chinese media site: People’s daily, written by a netizen named Jiang Bojing (姜伯静).  Compare them for yourself…

Google to withdraw from China

By well-known IT blogger: KESO

Google officially announced that they will no longer review and censor search results on google.cn and they will have discussions with the Chinese government in the next few weeks. How can Google.cn operate legally under the premise of not providing filtered searches? If they cannot achieve these, Google will consider closing Google.cn, even all of its China offices.

To Google, this is a difficult decision. To me, this is a painful choice. Most of my life online depend on Google. I use Google to search, Gmail to send emails, Google Reader to read many of my subscribed contents, Google Docs for managing all my office documents and Picasa for processing photos and even marking their geo-locations… All of these, there is no third party application can replace Google. Not to mention that there are large numbers of Chinese enterprises, such as Alibaba, need to rely on Google’s search and advertising for their global business.

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Just 2 days ago CC sent me a link to a Chinese blog post about how he noticed his personal emails from Gmail account was accessed and screened by GFW. I was skeptical and thought it could just be a hoax or hype or just a theory. And today, the news broke out. Google officially announced that they will no longer provide censored searches for Google.cn because they faced cyber attacks originated from China which targeted Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists! This could mean end of the road for Google in China.

As part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

My jaw dropped as I read the statement from Google. This is exactly what the blog I read 2 days ago tries to prove.

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Xiaozhai Village in Min County, Gansu Province is well-known throughout the country because media call it “China’s number one beggar village”. According to the numerous media coverage over the years, most of the farmers in this village are like migratory birds, migrating and begging through the developed coastal cities like Jinan, Qingdao, Shenyang, Nanjing etc. “going north in the summer and south in the winter”. Today this village strives to change its embarrassing image; among the 12 communities in Xiaozhai village, only two of them are still living with the old ways. However the bad reputation does not just go away in one day. Xiaozhai village has a long way to go to in order to clear its bad name. Recently China Youth Daily reporter visited the village to see how much it has changed; and whether this infamous village still carries on its humiliating tradition.

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Video from Ku6.com:

According to the Chinese law, it is illegal to operate casinos inside of mainland China. Any individual or organization operates gambling business constitutes criminal act. So in order to avoid the crackdown, criminals in mainland China opened casinos nearby outside of the Chinese border. For various reasons, many people from mainland China go to these casinos to gamble. Let’s take a look what happened there.

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These days, a post titled “A college graduate drifter’s confession letter to his peasant worker father” on MOP triggered heated discussions. Poster named “I am a little cat” (我是小猫猫一个) just graduated from college almost for a year. His monthly salary is one thousand yuan (=150 USD) which is less than his peasant worker father’s, so he had been lying to his family about his life… Many netizens related to him and said “You are not lonely”; “Whether you have money or not, just go home for New Year”. The post soon spread onto other Chinese sites and triggered more discussions on the current social issues in China, college graduates having difficulties finding jobs or finding the suitable jobs. Highly educated new college graduates are forced to work at jobs that do not use their full potential because of the tough job market and wages. They are so called college graduate “migrant workers”. (“民工化”)

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If you ever travel in China by train, make sure you don’t have any porno on your cell phone, or else you could be jailed!

From Zhengzhou evening news:

“A couple arrested for watching porn at home”, an incident happened 7 years ago which had triggered a national debate over the relationships and boundaries between the law and individual rights. Chongqing resident Zhao Peng (not his real name) never would have thought 7 years have passed but similar incident happened again; this time it happened to him, his cell phone had a clip of Japanese adult video which caused him being arrested.

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Avatar ticket prices will go up next week in China because the demand is so great, which means the ticket prices for the movie in IMAX-3D will be the highest in the world! Chinese netizens are complaining that, people in China, where the average income is 20 times lower than the U.S., have to pay three times as much as the people in the U. S for the same ticket. There are even talks of viewing strikes on the BBS and this netizen on MOP speaks passionately about this issue.

What tickets are hard to get now days? It is not Spring Festival, it is “Avatar”.

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By CC & Key

Starting 2010, 448,000 substitute teachers in China will be laid off (The word 清退 [qīng tuì] is used in the news. I looked up 清退in the dictionary it means to give back something that does not belong). Most of the already laid off teachers are struggling with difficult lives. And the teachers who are waiting to be laid off do not ask for more compensation, but they only want to leave with dignity, and hope that there will still be teachers for the children after they leave. Netizens are outraged, an article on Tianya (translated below) generated over 4000 comments in a day, and this post has also been re-posted all over the Chinese Internet. After the article, there are also pictures showing the hardships of these substitute teachers, so please keep scrolling.

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Youku has top 10 lists of videos in all categories, thanks Kaiser Kuo for the link!  I picked out the funniest videos from the top 10 list that do not require you to know Chinese. Enjoy!

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 “It’s not even a tad democratic”

This article (from Netease) got me really excited because I have always been interested in China’s democratization efforts. I previously translated a post on “How should we live before democracy?” As somewhat of a follow-up, this article will explain the changes happening in Guangzhou while also discussing how the Chinese government actually interprets democracy, which is something I’ve not seen discussed in most blogs about China (some of this is from my own blog).

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Some readers asked me to continue (part 1) translating the rest of the story, however the original post on Tianya was already deleted, luckily I found some websites here and here which reposted this story.

I have resumed secular life (part 2)
by 佛祖在我心2010

Our monastery is relatively a well-known one in the local area. It attracts a large number of worshippers and pilgrims each year. The government also gives us money for the construction of the monastery and so the abbot makes a nice side profit from all of it.

Of course, a celebrity visited our monastery. It was a female star, rising in the ranks in the recent years, and she was even called the number one beauty of Mainland China. But in fact I saw her with light makeup that day and she looked very ordinary to me.

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From Tianya:

I have resumed secular life, so why was I trying to save my soul in the beginning? Buddhists teach that all space-directions are void and compassion is the principle of life, but in the end I have found it’s only my imagination, everything is fake.  The monks nowadays all have twisted and perverted minds.  I lived in the the monastery for half a year, and I experienced the (same-sex) abnormal sexual behaviors between the monks and other unspoken rules between the abbots.  I even saw illicit things between monks and nuns.  I am really depressed.  Do these people really believe in Buddhism? Don’t they know they will go to hell? Sigh, I don’t want to be reminded of my unbearable past, but in order for more people to know the truth, I have decided to tell everything.

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